David Marcus - Charade: The Covid Lies That Crushed A Nation

A BOMBARDIER BOOKS BOOK

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-63758-186-5

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-187-2

Charade:

The Covid Lies That Crushed A Nation

2021 by David Marcus

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Tiffani Shea

This book contains research and commentary about COVID-19, which is classified as an infectious disease by the World Health Organization. Although every effort has been made to ensure that any medical or scientific information present within this book is accurate, the research about COVID-19 is still ongoing.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

To Libby

The Charade

A charade is very different from a magic trick. The latter is a mere illusion. Where did the rabbit come from? How did you know what card I chose? The former, the charade, is multifarious, all consumingit envelops one until they do not know the truth from fiction, until all of reality is entwined with the canard. For most of the year of our Lord 2020, which often felt more like His wrath than His love, Americans were living in a charade, a new normal as some called it. As we begin to fully understand the devastating effects of our response to the Coronavirus, the toll of our lockdowns, we must first unravel what happened to us and understand how we came to accept it.

There was one great central lie of the Coronavirus crisis, a pernicious yet seemingly encouraging phrase: We are all in this together. This was simply never true. Those who could work from home were not in it with those who found themselves without a paycheck; those for whom the $1,200 stimulus check was like a spring bonus were not in it with those who had to make it linger for months. The scientists and experts who warned, often times correctly, about the extreme approaches taken by our government and were mocked and called evil were not in it with the beloved and glorified public health officials heralded by the media. So varied were our experiences, in fact, state by state, city by city, that we wound up in some sense with two Americas, one resembling the functioning society of the old normal, and another the restrictive new normal of a shut-down country. And we arrived at two American populations, one ready to stay home at a moments instruction from the state and one more jealous of their basic rights as understood in the old normal.

The word charade is a relative newcomer to the English language, entering the lexicon in the late 18th century. One modern definition is as follows. An absurd pretense intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance. So, for example, keeping millions of kids out of school for months at a time was not talked about as child abuse, but rather the soothing stay home, stay safe. The permanent shuttering of a third of small businesses was not called an economic disaster, but rather stopping the spread. Surges in suicides, drug addiction, depression, and domestic abuse were not spoken of as horrifying crises, but rather doing our part.

Early on in the crisis, to even mention the downsides of lockdown as anything more than a trifling inconvenience was met with accusations of trying to kill Grandma. Even by the time that some, mostly on the Right, came to fight back against pandemic correctness and speak the names of those downsides, the whole thing had become so mired in the politics of the presidential election that no rational balance could emerge. As with so much of our society and culture under his presidency, Donald Trump was the central figure and focus of a pandemic that was obviously much larger than him or his leadership. In all honesty, one of the great tragedies of the crisis was that it occurred in an election year: both sides had perverse interests to overstate or understate the threat of the virus.

But ultimately, this was not primarily a story about Washington, DC or the federal government. Every state, even every city or small town, took a different approach. Governors became heroes or villains depending on the bias of the media outlet discussing them. Results, both medical and economic, in each state were cherry-picked to pretend that one approach or another were the obvious and true correct ones. In fact, to the extent that the results varied, and they didnt actually vary that much, judging them is a subjective endeavor.

There is, of course, a game we all know called charades, one in which we act out an object or idea without saying it. And performance too was central to the pandemic response. Masks, for example, became more than just an effort at mitigating the spread of the disease; they were worn also as a signal that one took the virus seriously. They were even worn in social media profile pictures, as if breath could flow from a laptop or cell phone screen. Among many, a performative nonchalance flowered, Its not so bad, they would say, but they did not tend to be people waiting hours in breadlines that looked like colorized copies of some 1930s photograph.

By the end of 2020, more than three hundred thousand Americans would succumb to the Coronavirus, the vast majority elderly or infirm, but this was much more than a medical crisis. In most places, scarcely any aspects of our lives were left untouched by it. This is not a story about a disease: it is not a story about government; it is not a story about the media, or individual lives; it is a story about everything. And it has not ended. There is a profound purpose to looking back over what happened to us all in 2020, painful though some things may be to remember. In judging the mistakes, as well as the heroism, in examining the successes and the far too frequent failures of our response to the virus from China, we can learn not merely how to better handle the next pandemic that may come, but also what freedom means to us going forward.

In a nation founded on fundamental individual rights, how many of those rights can be rescinded because of a public health crisis? And what exactly constitutes a public health crisis? Under what circumstances can the state deny you the right to leave your home, to operate a business, to go to church, and to send your kids to school? In the 225-year history of the United States of America, never has everyone, every single citizen, been simultaneously compelled to obey the edicts and diktats of government in the way we just experienced. So let us look back with cool and rational eyes at this charade and decide if we should ever allow the like to happen again.